Thefallenhun

I'd totally do all of this, but i'd have to redo several landings removing parts and not adding the mechjeb control, I don't use its autopilot, just the extra information is REALLY handy. Otherwise its a damn protractor to tell when the phase angle is. I've gone everywhere except gilly moho and a few of jool's moons.

The point about theoretical vs actual windows is an interesting one, does anyone know a good way to calculate truee transfer windows taking into account eccentricity? It seems like it would be easier to correct for that THEN burn, rather than go from a planar orbit around kerbin to a planar sun orbit, THEN correct.

I would think that thing would wobble like crazy. You need to use the larger boosters, try using some of the big red ones with atlas engines. As a general tip for getting things into orbit, if you aren't getting it up there, add more engines. Try using concentric rings of staging using the detachment manifolds.

I'm sort of at a refining stage in my space program. I can't claim I pay attention to TWR per se throughout my launch, but obviously at least 1 to begin getting off the ground. I have a design now that is just massive rings of concentric boosters, and its been able to get me anywhere, but I'm running into a few problems. So by the time I have a stable kerbin orbit, I've got about 1500 m/s left on a ring of six red boosters around my central craft, which is enough to begin but not finish long distance transfer burns. At that point the plan is to switch to 10 nuclear engines, but even with 10 since the ship is so heavy, I find that the burns are so slow that I miss my window and end up having to do expensive mid course corrections. I'm leaning away from using nuclear stuff to inject large objects on far trajectories, because quite simply it goes too slowly. Of course, in not doing so I miss out on a lot of delta V. You don't really NEED it, but now I shoot for at least .80 TWR for injection. Though of course my upper stage with six nuclear engines injects pretty fast, but each engine only has an FLT-200 to draw from.